Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/religion-spirituality/judaism-religion-spirituality/page/28/)
Humanistic Judaism is a comprehensive response to the needs of contemporary Jews to create personal and communal experiences that celebrate identity, values, and connection. In my experience as the lay ceremonial leader of a congregation of Humanistic Jews, the pursuit of these experiences can lead to great rewards in unexpected places, places never visited by the other branches of the modern Jewish tree.
In previous essays, in dealing with the dull repetitions of the mishkan (tabernacle) narrative, we discussed the idea of boundaries, of distance introduced as a result of the sin of the golden calf. The mishkan structure itself, and the garments of the priests, act as signifiers of, and simultaneously as a means of overcoming the boundaries and distance introduced by the sin of the golden calf. R. Zadok Hacohen adds an interesting comment, which would be incredibly radical except that the source of the quote is the Talmud (BT Nedarim 22: )
“If it weren’t for the sin of the Golden Calf, the Jews would only have received the Five Books of the Torah and the Book of Joshua”.
Each of these religions offers me different ways to understand and deal with the challenges of the human condition–but, above all, what I have come to embrace most deeply in my search for faith, is not an official religion, with a title or building or set of written laws, practices, and rules, but my experience of and with nature.
It turns out that my greatest devotion, commitment, love and joy, outside of parenting, or perhaps integrally linked to it, is connecting with and protecting the earth–soil, rock, water, mountains, oceans, rivers, trees, animals, birds, reptiles, and all living creatures.
When the Gaza war began in November 2012, American Jews’ lack of an embracing moral language, a language that could acknowledge all viewpoints, sufferings, terrors, humanity, became painfully obvious. To speak of the civilians dying in Gaza was, to many American Jews, to attack Israel and deny its legitimate rights to exist and defend itself from missiles. We seemed to have no language in which we could speak both of Israeli families huddling in bomb shelters as far north as Jerusalem and children crawling through Gaza rubble. Indeed, to judge by the anguished, enraged Facebook and Twitter exchanges I saw, we didn’t even have a language in which we could acknowledge and address the feelings and perspectives boiling among American Jews.
As is usual with events of the magnitude of tsunamis, earthquakes, and hurricanes, at some point theologians, essayists, and pundits of various sorts will attempt to make some sense out of the catastrophe. One question which arises (usually sometime after the question arises as to who will pay for the damages) is the old theological question, “where was God when all this happened?” or, “how could a God let this happen”?
The many branches of Judaism confuse me and I dread being asked by non-Jews to explain what it means to be Reform or Conservative, let alone Renewal or Reconstructionist. I’ve looked up the definitions but they just don’t resonate with me. The affiliation of a synagogue means far less to me than the sense of community that comes from sharing Jewish rituals and traditions with friends and family.
Kristeva, in her Powers of Horror, describes the powerful sensation of food loathing as an evolution of desire into abjection-
…loathing an item of food, a piece of filth, waste, or dung…the repugnance, the retching that thrusts me to the side and turns me away from defilement, sewage and much…The fascinated start that leads me towards and separates me from them… food loathing is perhaps the most elementary and most archaic form of abjection… ‘I’ want none of that element… ‘I’ expel it … I abject myself within the same motion through which ‘I’ claim to establish myself… There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being…
On an alarmingly milder-than-normal January day this month, about 100 religious leaders representing Jewish, Christian, Catholic, Islamic, Native American, Buddhist traditions gathered in the historic New York Avenue Presbyterian Church before processing in a silent march two blocks to the north side of the White House for a “pray-in for the climate.”
Rabbi Yosef Haim, better known as the Ben Ish Hai (born about 1834), wrote in his Aderet Eliyahu that the ‘plague’ of darkness we encounter in this week’s perasha is the last that Moshe and Aharon are responsible for (he builds around a Talmudic dictum that a prisoner liable for lashing can only receive a number divisible by 3, hence the maximum of 39, and thus the plagues have to be 9), while the tenth one, that of the killing of the firstborn, was a separate entity brought about by God alone, not in the category of plagues.
Having worked at AIPAC and having worked with it as a legislative aide in Congress for 20 years, I know that the lobby is not really about Israel. It is about exerting influence, pushing our government around and promoting war with Muslims and Arabs, but it hasn’t been about Israel for decades.